Patterns of self-organization in the context of urban planning: Reconsidering venues of participation

2018 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 40-57 ◽  
Author(s):  
Efrat Eizenberg
Keyword(s):  
Urban Planning ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
Physical Space ◽  
Self Organization ◽  
Urban Change ◽  
Urban Residents ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Bottom Up ◽  
Power And Agency

This article unpacks the relations that exist between the planning institution and urban residents by examining processes of self-organization in planning. Approaching self-organization with the lens of assemblage, the article proposes three categories or patterns of self-organization of different urban actors and portrays how they act in different forms to induce urban change. The three self-organization categories are as follows: (1) self-organization by the disenfranchised for basic rights, (2) self-organization by the ordinary for community interests, and (3) self-organization by the powerful for economic gains. In these different forms of self-organization, power and agency are differentially constituted by the relations between the residents, the planning institution, and the physical space. Moreover, the impacts of these actions on the urban space vary. Nevertheless, there are also some resemblances between groups and actions that are commonly dissociated. Unpacking different manifestations of self-organization in urban planning proposes a more relational interpretation that emphasizes the inextricable and overlapping relations of formal and informal planning and of top-down and bottom-up planning, and surfaces a different understanding of urban power relations.

scholarly journals Expanded Urban Planning as a Vehicle for Understanding and Shaping Smart, Liveable Cities

2014 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Aija Staffans ◽  
Liisa Horelli
Keyword(s):  
Urban Planning ◽  
Smart City ◽  
Smart Cities ◽  
Self Organization ◽  
The European Union ◽  
Community Informatics ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Planning Approach ◽  
Academic Publications

Smart city is currently a trendy concept that has been promoted by many international companies, universities and cities, such as IBM, CISCO, MIT, Shanghai, as well as the European Union.  This top down, technocratic approach has been severely criticized in many academic publications. Concurrently there is an increasing buzz emerging from citizens – women and men, who are involved in the application of community informatics for self-organization in urban settings. Consequently, the smart city as a contested concept and an initiative is under social and political construction. We argue that the smart city can be better understood and implemented, when framed from a holistic and integrative perspective as a multi-scalar and multi-dimensional endeavor that is approached through “expanded urban planning”. The aim of the article is to present and discuss the expanded urban planning approach as an alternative story to smart cities. The relevance of this approach is assessed in the light of a case study of Designing for the Smart City, a course for future architects and planners, at the Politecnico di Milano, Italy.

Gathering Global Intelligence for Assessing Performance of Smart, Sustainable, Resilient, and Inclusive Cities (S2RIC)

2020 ◽  
pp. 305-345
Author(s):  
Maria Panagiotopoulou ◽  
Anastasia Stratigea ◽  
Akrivi Leka
Keyword(s):  
Urban Planning ◽  
Selection Process ◽  
Disaster Reduction ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Bottom Up ◽  
Policy Makers ◽  
Global Sustainability ◽  
Indicator Framework ◽  
Indicator Frameworks

This chapter sets up a comprehensive, multidimensional indicator framework for assessing performance of Smart, Sustainable, Resilient, and Inclusive Cities (S2RIC). A thorough review of contemporary, globally-initiated, indicator frameworks that address cities' smartness, sustainability, resilience, and inclusiveness is conducted – top-down approach; coupled with an attempt to integrate the different perspectives explored into a more enriched and coherent indicator framework. This aims at providing assistance to urban planners and policy makers in assessing, monitoring, managing cities, and making more informed sustainability decisions; while keeping in track with new concerns in the urban planning realm (e.g. resilience, disaster reduction) and recently endorsed global sustainability goals and frameworks. An indicators' selection process is also illustrated – bottom-up approach – for navigating in the proposed framework and identifying appropriate city- and citizen-specific indicators for carrying out relevant assessments and guiding sound policies.

scholarly journals A Bottom-Up and Top-Down Participatory Approach to Planning and Designing Local Urban Development: Evidence from an Urban University Center

Land ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 98 ◽  
Author(s):  
Teodoro Semeraro ◽  
Zaccarelli Nicola ◽  
Alejandro Lara ◽  
Francesco Sergi Cucinelli ◽  
Roberta Aretano
Keyword(s):  
Urban Area ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Social Issues ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Decision Makers ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Bottom Up ◽  
University Center ◽  
Planning And Design ◽  
Urban University

The urban area is characterized by different urban ecosystems that interact with different institutional levels, including different stakeholders and decision-makers, such as public administrations and governments. This can create many institutional conflicts in planning and designing the urban space. It would arguably be ideal for an urban area to be planned like a socio-ecological system where the urban ecosystem and institutional levels interact with each other in a multi-scale analysis. This work embraces a planning process that aims at being applied to a multi-institutional level approach that is able to match different visions and stakeholders' needs, combining bottom-up and top-down participation approaches. At the urban scale, the use of this approach is sometimes criticized because it appears to increase conflicts between the different stakeholders. Starting from a case study in the Municipality of Lecce, South Italy, we apply a top-down and bottom-up participation approach to overcome conflicts at the institutional levels in the use of the urban space in the Plan of the Urban University Center. The bottom-up participation action analyzes the vision of people that frequent the urban context. After that, we share this vision in direct comparison with decision-makers to develop the planning and design solutions. The final result is a draft of the hypothetical Plan of the Urban University Center. In this way, the bottom-up and top-down approaches are useful to match the need of the community that uses the area with the vision of urban space development of decision-makers, reducing the conflicts that can arise between different institutional levels. In this study, it also emerges that the urban question is not green areas vs. new buildings, but it is important to focus on the social use of the space to develop human well-being. With the right transition of information and knowledge between different institutional levels, the bottom-up and top-down approaches help develop an operative effective transdisciplinary urban plan and design. Therefore, public participation with bottom-up and top-down approaches is not a tool to obtain maximum consensus, but mainly a moment of confrontation to better address social issues in urban planning and design.

scholarly journals Urban planning method for fostering social sustainability: Can bottom-up and top-down meet?

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
pp. 100284
Author(s):  
Jelena Atanacković Jeličić ◽  
Milan Rapaić ◽  
Mirna Kapetina ◽  
Saša Medić ◽  
Dejan Ecet
Keyword(s):  
Urban Planning ◽  
Social Sustainability ◽  
Planning Method ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Bottom Up

scholarly journals The Dialectic of Bottom-up and Top-down Emergence in Social Systems

1970 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 28-50 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christian Fuchs ◽  
Wolfgang Hofkirchner
Keyword(s):  
Systems Theory ◽  
Social Systems ◽  
Theoretical Explanation ◽  
Self Organization ◽  
Hierarchical Systems ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Bottom Up ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Determinism And Indeterminism ◽  
Point Of Departure

In this paper we will present a theoretical explanation of the relationship between so-called individual emergence and the emergence of social systems. We want to take as our point of departure the assumption that from the perspective of hierarchical systems theory self-organization on the level of social systems includes a bottom-up process as well as a top-down process. The bottom-up process refers to what in sociology is called agency, the top-down process refers to what is called structure. We will show that it is convenient to suggest that these processes be linked in a dialectical manner. In this respect we will discuss problems of determinism and indeterminism. This is the background against which we will try to clarify the notion of individual emergence. Our rather general considerations will be illustrated by how ideology, that is consciousness in a collective as well as an individual sense, is conceived of by a number of theories and how it should be conceived of when aspects of self-organization are included. We will conclude with a statement that makes clear why consciousness is a property of individuals that emerges only when individuals participate in society and why society emerges only when individuals are endowed with consciousness.

scholarly journals Ascending–descending and direct–inverse cascades of Reynolds stresses in turbulent Couette flow

2021 ◽  
Vol 930 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alessandro Chiarini ◽  
Mariadebora Mauriello ◽  
Davide Gatti ◽  
Maurizio Quadrio
Keyword(s):  
Couette Flow ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Normal Component ◽  
Physical Space ◽  
Limited Range ◽  
Order Structure ◽  
Reynolds Stresses ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Bottom Up ◽  
Near Wall

The interaction between small- and large-scale structures and the coexisting bottom-up and top-down processes are studied in a turbulent plane Couette flow, where space-filling longitudinal rolls appear at relatively low values of the Reynolds number $Re$ . A direct numerical simulation database at $Re_\tau =101$ is built to replicate the highest $Re$ considered in recent experimental work by Kawata & Alfredsson (Phys. Rev. Lett., vol. 120, 2018, 244501). Our study is based on the exact budget equations for the second-order structure function tensor $\left \langle {\delta u_i \delta u_j} \right \rangle$ , i.e. the anisotropic generalized Kolmogorov equations (AGKE). The AGKE study production, redistribution, transport and dissipation of every Reynolds stress tensor component, considering simultaneously the physical space and the space of scales, and properly define the concept of scale in the inhomogeneous wall-normal direction. We show how the large-scale energy-containing motions are involved in the production and redistribution of the turbulent fluctuations. Both bottom-up and top-down interactions occur, and the same is true for direct and inverse cascading. The wall-parallel components $\left \langle {\delta u \delta u} \right \rangle$ and $\left \langle {\delta w \delta w} \right \rangle$ show that both small and large near-wall scales feed the large scales away from the wall. The wall-normal component $\left \langle {\delta v \delta v} \right \rangle$ is different, and shows a dominant top-down dynamics, being produced via pressure-strain redistribution away from the wall and transferred towards near-wall larger scales via an inverse cascade. The off-diagonal component shows a top-down interaction, with both direct and inverse cascades, albeit the latter takes place within a limited range of scales.

scholarly journals Emergent ecology: Creating inclusive cities through speculative interaction

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Shaneel Kumar
Keyword(s):  
Developing Countries ◽  
Urban Planning ◽  
Urban Design ◽  
Cultural Context ◽  
Urban Population ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Bottom Up ◽  
Socioeconomic Condition ◽  
Short Period ◽  
Design Behaviour

<p>Many cities within developing countries are facing an increased demand for space to work and live as contemporary top-down urbanisation strains to facilitate the rising urban population. Future projections estimate that the world’s population will transition from rural to urban living within a relatively short period of time, causing concern towards transition and facilitation of culturally specific demographics and their values within the existing socioeconomic condition of a city. This research proposes a speculative bottom-up approach to urban design which utilises the behavioural tendencies of various demographics within a cultural context to inform how a city can facilitate inclusivity through diverse social and economic interaction. Inclusive cities are paramount to the socioeconomic success of developing countries, with the potential to provide over 80% of the country’s economic growth. This investigation looks at New Delhi, India as a context within which to test the proposed emergent model for urban design (behaviour driven approach) using a simulation-based methodology to test how New Delhi’s various demographics can diversely interact to invoke an inclusive future city in response. The speculative design investigation of this research will highlight the potential of bottom-up urban design and the merit of using behaviour-based, emergent methodologies for urban planning, creating diverse interaction and an alternative to contemporary top-down urban planning. The aim of the research is to develop a methodology for simulating how agent behaviour can be utilised to inform urban design. The methodology will simulate an urban population by utilising individual and collective behaviour to inform the organisation of density within an urban scale. The data will form a “pre-geometry state” in which typology, infrastructure and other key nodes can be instanced to create an emergent, urban ecology informed by agent interactions.</p>

Whose interest finally counts? The statutory production of urban space at the fringes of Dhaka, Bangladesh

2018 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 167-190 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shahadat Hossain ◽  
Kirsten Hackenbroch
Keyword(s):  
Urban Planning ◽  
Empirical Evidence ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
Urban Fringe ◽  
Project Implementation ◽  
Housing Project ◽  
Spatial Justice ◽  
Public Resource ◽  
Public Resources

In this article, we build our theoretical arguments on an empirical account of a state-implemented housing project in the periphery of Dhaka. Thus, we elaborate on a set of bureaucratic acts, the existing power relations, and group interests that influence planning practices and condition people’s access to public resources. Analyzing the process of project implementation, we explain the various resources and strategies that those in relatively powerful positions activate in order to considerably influence planning practice and public resource distribution. We specifically analyze how the strategies and discourses employed to bring the project forward influence the emerging spatialities and issues of socio-spatial justice and inequality at Dhaka’s urban fringe. This article thus provides empirical evidence explaining the impossibility of rigid statutory planning. Finally, we reflect on what urban planning needs to acknowledge in order for positive change.

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